Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction (review)

Reviewed by Bruce Peter, The Glasgow School of Art

In recent years, a great deal of new scholarship on the emergence of British architectural modernism between the wars has been produced—and Elizabeth Darling's latest account is to be welcomed. It is an interesting close analysis of the modern movement's emergence in London's intellectual life, in the architectural and lifestyle press, through architectural education and, eventually, as government policy. How, she asks, could modernism have achieved hegemony in postwar Britain when so many existing accounts of the 1930s architectural scene suggest that the modern movement was peripheral to British architectural discourse?

Here, the focus is on modernism with a capital "M," and on practitioners and theorists whose modernist credentials are universally accepted, although she concentrates on somewhat less well documented projects, such as Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove and the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham. Darling argues persuasively for clear chains of causation which led to modernism being embraced by government, local authorities, and social reformers in the postwar era. Her "narratives of modernity" begin with British responses to the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs and end in 1942 (a brave decision but a good one) when Abraham Games designed his famous "Your Britain: Fight For It Now" wartime propaganda posters. These showed white modernist architecture emerging from the ruins of wartime devastation and signalled that modernism had won widespread acceptance as the best—indeed, the only—way forward for postwar Britain.

Darling is an acknowledged expert on the life and work of Wells Coates and her description of his early days in London as an émigré from Japan, the son of Canadian missionaries, is highly revealing. Quoting his friend Maxwell Fry's first impressions, and Coates's own private correspondence, she paints an image of a young iconoclast, in search of a useful role in the modern world. Naturally attracted to London's bohemian life, centered on Soho and Fitzrovia, he took inspiration from the unconventional lifestyles of characters such as Elsa Lanchester, who ran a nightclub called the "Cave of Harmony." Darling then documents how, through his growing intellectual and artistic social circle, Coates began to design progressive interiors and how, through meeting Professor Mansfield Forbes, the Twentieth Century Group was formed. By this means, yet more fresh alliances were made with Country Life magazine, with the Design and Industries Association and, later, with the Architectural Review, and so promodernist opinion began to reach ever wider audiences. Although this ground has been trodden before, Darling manages to bring fresh insights to this reviewer's attention—such as Coates's instinct to veto the possibility of Howard Robertson, Grey Wornum, Walmesley Lewis, and Oliver Hill attaining membership of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS). Apparently, they had proven themselves to be insufficiently idealistic ever to be taken seriously as "true" modernists.

Later on, when Darling shifts her focus to an analysis of education at the Architectural Association in the late 1930s, communist sympathisers amongst its staff and students were almost equally dismissive of the MARS Group, dominated by Fry and Coates. They felt that their 1938 exhibition had not only failed to explain modernism in the context of a historic architectural "grand narrative," but that they had also positioned themselves too closely to the London intellectual "establishment" ever to be truly "revolutionary." Yet, Darling observes that, earlier in the decade, the Twentieth Century Group had indeed achieved considerable success in bringing such "talkative intellectuals" round to the modernist cause. From their Marxist perspective, however, Architectural Association agitators realized that, to achieve modernist domination, it would be necessary to control the means of production of architectural graduates, schooled in an appropriate ideological context. Consequently, the reader is left to ponder the postwar consequences of one group of protomodernists positioning itself as being more radical in its credentials than another. How were such architects ever successfully to interface with bourgeois Britain?

The relationship between Britain's...